In many scenarios, mobile device platforms pose problems for presenting comprehensive and powerful user interfaces due to factors such as smaller display real estate, less powerful processing power, intermittent access to networks, and the like. Today's workforce often needs to access files, documents, and various information regardless of where the worker is currently located. For example, a company employee may work some of the time on a laptop or desktop computer system in the office, travel home while still accessing email from, for example, a tablet or smartphone, and then want to resume work when she arrives home using, for example, a different mobile or wired device.
Different solutions have been suggested to address such problems. For example, special user interfaces have been developed with particularized applications that are meant to run more smoothly on mobile, potentially smaller footprint, devices. These interfaces which are native to the mobile device may run efficiently, but they do not guarantee access to all of the types of data that the employee may need.
As another example, centrally managed desktops and software infrastructure along with virtualization have proliferated as a mechanism for enabling people of large and small organizations to be guaranteed access to their data from anywhere. Further, dedicated “stateful” sessions that use remote desktop protocols such as Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Virtual Network Computing (VNC), or PCoIP (PC over IP) enable workers to essentially “log in” to their desktops remotely. Use of these protocols to access a physical desktop (as opposed to a virtual desktop) require the computer hosting the desktop to remain powered on.
Similar (virtualization) protocols have also been employed to access users' virtual desktops. A virtual desktop is a virtual computing system, hosted typically by a virtualization infrastructure provided by a datacenter, that operates as a desktop or workstation computer that an end user can interact with using the remote desktop protocol and client software and/or hardware. The client software and/or hardware transmits user input such as keyboard or mouse input to the remote system to be processed there, and receives display and other data, such as sound, for presentation to the user. One problem with the use of remote desktop protocol and session access to a user's (virtual) desktop on a mobile device is that the interface is often too cumbersome for the small real estate supported by a mobile device and/or the latency for obtaining data is in some situations too much to be tolerable. Moreover, users in the office would likely prefer to use their desktops in “native” mode—that is without needing to be virtualized, if nothing else to achieve speed advantages.
To address some of these problems, applications such as “Dropbox” have been developed to provide anywhere access “cloud” storage to effectively transport files in a web accessible folder. All such files must be explicitly placed in a Dropbox folder by the user in order to be made available to another device or at another time. An advantage to such solutions is that it allows a mobile device to use cloud storage as opposed to local storage on the device for interchange of files between devices.
Other enhancements to this basic notion of web based (or cloud) storage have been developed. One such enhancement is offered by VMware's Mirage product. VMware Mirage provides a “File Portal” to a user's desktop computing environment. FIGS. 1A and 1B are illustrative screen displays from a VMware Mirage File Portal. A web browser 100 can be used on any remote client device, for example, a mobile device, to access a list 110 of the directories and their contents that are present on the user's desktop computer, for example, in her office, as long as the user's computer is centrally managed. The user's Window's “desktop directory” 112 is shown as a folder within the file system present on the user's device. FIG. 1B shows a view of the user's “desktop directory,” 112 which contains a listing 120 of all of the files and subdirectories contained on the user's computer. Thus, the VMware Mirage File Portal provides an extended view of the file system on the user's computer rather than the single directory visible using Dropbox.
Solutions that have gone beyond the use of a remote desktop protocol, however, do nothing to help a user maintain context from using one device to the next.